Journalism’s self-appointed guardians have denounced Vargas’s deception with no regard for the realities of his immigrant status

Vargas showed a lot of courage and a lot faith in his fellow journalists when he stepped out of the closet. Problem for him, it was the wrong closet to step out of. It’s hard to imagine how he must have believed that the majority of journalists gave a damn about the individuals who live among us illegally. He must have thought they had compassion for those who live a secret life in terror of being discovered. He didn’t interpret his colleagues’ silence around the plight, treatment, and indignity of illegal workers who live in the shadows and are increasingly hated by self described freedom loving Americans as meaning they didn’t care, or worse, that they agreed with such perspective.

He must have thought there was a silent concern and objection among his peers to the growing concessions made by legal citizens, of their own civil liberties, in exchange for the promise that illegals would be weeded out and deported, and anyone hiring or even transporting them would be punished.

Surly, he must have thought, his colleagues would be inspired when they realized that a so-called illegal could be anyone! Even a Pulitzer prize winning fellow journalist.

His experience must be a living hell, to realize how those of his fellow colleagues whom he thought shared a real concern and compassion for humanity and freedom, were in fact shallow, petty and hollow.

Vargas is a man persecuted by unjust laws for being who he is – an undocumented immigrant – trying to live not just a normal, but an extraordinary, life. For that, he should be applauded. Meanwhile, Bronstein and others in the journalism establishment are rewriting Vargas’s tragedy as a boilerplate melodrama, with themselves playing the victims.–Excerpt from The media deportation of Jose Antonio Vargas | Daniel Denvir | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk Click here to read more.

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The status quo of education in the U.S. is destructive to our Nation, and to ignore this truth is to be numb, unconscious or in denial of reality.

"If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. We have even squandered the gains in student achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge. Moreover, we have dismantled essential support systems which helped make those gains possible. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament."--A Nation At Risk - April 1983

Drug War Clock for Current Year

Police arrested an estimated 858,408 persons for cannabis violations in 2009. Of those charged with cannabis violations, approximately 89 percent were charged with possession only.
Source: Uniform Crime Reports, Federal Bureau of Investigation Your tax dollars at work--but for whom?

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Dedicated to considerations of justice and the pursuit of goodness… "to sting people and whip them into a fury, all in the service of truth." --Plato on Socrates